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Hollywood’s Summer Box Office Coin Toss

This season’s slate is much less surefire than the mid-2010s MCU lineup or those live-action Disney remakes. Will the teetering theater industry end up closer to the $4 billion of 2023 or below the $3.3 billion domestic totals for 2022?

the fall guy
The Fall Guy is exactly what moviegoers say they want in summer: fun, original, action-heavy, with real stars playing appealing characters. Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Scott Mendelson
May 3, 2024

Perhaps the most curious aspect of this summer movie season is that non-franchise films are poised to dominate two of the first three weekends. The Fall Guy, loosely based on a 1980s TV show nobody remembers, banks on the appeal of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and represents the kind of A-level action movie that fantasy franchises seemingly put out to pasture. Ditto Paramount’s Ryan Reynolds-led If—an original, family-friendly fantasy about imaginary friends living among us. It’s the kind of film that became much less bankable once audiences began flocking to all-quadrant PG-13 flicks like Transformers.